Google Nexus 5 review: Is new Android handset the best phone of 2013?

There is something special about the Nexus 5. It took us a while to put our finger on it, but we finally think we have got it figured out.

You see, every other flagship Android phone has been spectacular in its own way. HTC nailed the design, while LG's G2 stunned us with its screen. The Nexus 5 takes some of the best from each, puts it all together and then sells it to you for less. It's quite an achievement.

Hardware and Design

There isn't a single part to the Nexus 5 that suggests it's a budget handset. The matte plastic polycarbonate back is nicely offset against a clean gloss black front, while the ceramic lock and volume keys are a quality piece of kit.

The ergonomics of the Nexus 5 are absolutely spot on. Admittedly we do have fairly small hands, but no matter who we handed the Nexus 5 over to, no-one complained about its typing and usage experience.

The 5-inch screen has a thin bezel that keeps the overall size of the phone down, which means the whole device ends up being just 69.17 x 137.84 x 8.59 mm in size and weighing 130 grams. It feels perfectly pocketable and nice and solid in the hand.

Just a note on the matte plastic back. We tested both the white and black versions of the Nexus 5 and the black option is a bit fingerprint friendly. The white version, however, is more prone to picking up the color from your jeans pocket, so it's really a case of which you prefer. If it were up to us, the white handset is the one to go for.

The only thing that slightly annoys us about the Nexus 5 build is that the bottom section of the screen is taken up with Android keys, rather than using physical buttons on the hardware below. Other than that, it's hard to fault and is proof that, just as Nokia has shown, plastics can be done right in smartphones.

Going Full HD

The 4.95-inch display is Full HD with 445 ppi to play with. For us, that is more than enough. Unless you are the sort of person who enjoys reading an email an inch from their phone screen, you really aren't going to notice a single pixel here.

In terms of display quality, the Nexus 5 is very good. It is bested by the LG G2 and HTC One in terms of viewing angles, but only just. Color reproduction is some of the best in class and when viewed straight on, the Gorilla Glass 3 protected display is one of the best out there.

What LG has done with the Nexus 5 hardware is do away with some of the fluff that makes other phones expensive. The display is 1080p, but doesn't have a ton of fancy processing tech to drive costs up. Instead, it is just pin-sharp and accurate.

As for internal specs, the 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor is no slouch, but then we already knew that. It has been making waves in the Android world with the likes of the LG G2 and Note 3 for quite some time. To see it in a phone at this price point, however, is incredibly impressive. This is a class-leading mobile processor on sale for peanuts.

The only fault we have with the Nexus 5 was its battery. A good few cycles and switching off plenty of notifications saw us getting through a day on the 2,300 mAh unit, but any period of intense usage would start to rapidly drain power. It's annoying, because proper all-day battery life would've been the icing on the cake.

The question is then, have LG and Google tried too hard here?

2GB of RAM keeps multi-tasking absolutely sound, while Android 4.4 Kit Kat feels like the slickest version of the OS yet, but more on that later. Finally, you have 16GB or 32GB of internal storage to play with. For us, this can be a bit of an issue simply because we like to carry about a lot of music on our mobile.

The money saved with a purchase of a Nexus 5, however, really stops this from being an issue. For example, you could buy a 16GB Nexus 5 and a 64GB iPod Touch for the same price as one 32GB iPhone 5S. So we aren't complaining.

So then, it feels quality, packs a top-end processor and a great screen, but costs less. What more could you want?

Camera

The 8-megapixel unit included with the Nexus 5 is the phone's only real major weakness. It can, at times, deliver very impressive results, but like many other Android handsets, is unpredictable at best.

Problems tend to occur in low light, where noise and color casting fills up the frame. Optical image stabilisation does its best to fix photographic woes, but it's more the unpredictability of what the sensor will do that is an issue.

In bright sunlight for example, pictures can get very washed out, while darker days see them being under exposed. Given the absolute right conditions, though, and the Nexus 5 camera is actually very good.

We aren't so sure about the way the actual camera unit itself looks either. Slapped on the back, the raised part around the lens just looks slightly out of place.

Video Calling

The front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera is perfectly adequate for video calling, but up against the super-wide angled offering on the HTC One, it could be better.

Really, the camera highlights what the Nexus 5 just can't quite do. You get every top spec component out there for Android phones, but none are quite executed to the perfecting standards of individual phones. So the camera is good, but not Lumia 1020 good, while the screen is nice, but not LG G2 nice. You get the idea.

User Interface and Apps

Android 4.4 Kit Kat is perhaps the star of the show here. It reminds us yet again that Google's operating system works best when it's left alone. The animations are slick, the OS fast and the widgets included all you need. Devices like the Note 3 and Xperia Z1 seem slightly naff and overcomplicated compared to it.

First up, we love full screen apps. The notifications bar is definitely handy, but enjoying an app in full 4.95-inch form is great. Then there is the slightly retouched UI, coupled with a new look Roboto font, that results in a fresh and cleaner experience.

The dialler is definitely our favorite twist, though. It aggregates the people you call most, so you can quickly get to them whenever you boot it up. Those who you don't want sat at the top of the dialler can simply be swiped away either left or right, just like a card in Google Now.

Let's Hangout

Hangouts is more deeply integrated into Kit Kat, replacing the text messaging app and rolling both Hangouts and SMS into one. Initially it irritated us, as we found our lengthy hangout chats from work sat on the top of the app with text messages from friends getting pushed to the bottom.

After a while though, the one stop shop for all forms of text communication made sense. We found ourselves using hangouts for everything, even replacing emails with a quick hangout message when need be. You do need to be careful though, as if you use Hangouts for work, you can find colleagues chat's boiling up to the top of the app, so accidental text messaging is a possibility.

The camera app has been given a tweak for Kit Kat and the Nexus. Settings are accessed by swiping your finger up through various levels of menus after a long press on the camera screen. While it does away with loads of the usual screen clutter on camera apps, we found it could be a touch counter intuitive as a lot of the function icons don't make it clear exactly what they do. Swiping up to drill down into the camera menus just isn't easy, instead we would've preferred a traditional menu better hidden.

As for applications, Android fans already know just how extensive the Google Play Store is. Included with the phone is the best of what Google has to offer, including the rather excellent Google Drive, which is ideal for work. Then there is a new look Google Maps and your choice of over 1 million other apps to download. Plenty then.

Music and Movies

We have already spoken about just how much of a behemoth the Google Play store has become when apps are concerned. There really is everything you could ever possibly want in terms of ticking the standard smartphone boxes.

Movies from Google aren't thrust down your neck in quite the same way as they are on the Nexus 7. There is no big screen movies widget sat on the home screen the moment you turn the phone on. They're still there for you to rent should you be so inclined, just as music and apps are.

In terms of playback, the Nexus 5 is a bit weak in the speaker department. There are two sets of drilled holes to the left and right of the phone's microUSB port, but only one is actually a speaker, the other being used for the microphone.

The iPhone 5S is a bit of a misnomer really. The two feel like very different devices indeed. We already spoke about how the Nexus and iPad Air make a great working combination, but for us the iPhone feels like a different piece of kit. It's about simplicity and user interaction, not specifications and customisation.

Verdict

The question is then, have LG and Google tried too hard here? Attempting to build 'one phone to rule them all' and sell it to you for less is a very difficult task indeed.

While we don't think the Nexus 5 outperforms some of this year's other Android flagships, its price means that every single one of its slight flaws is forgivable when held up against the competition.

This is a phone that provides exceptional value, feels special and should be more than enough handset for all but the most demanding of Android users.

It might be slightly late to the game, but the Nexus 5 could well be our favorite smartphone this year.